Soviet Jokes
As the 1920s and 1930s wore on, Soviet leadership pushed for more extreme forms of centralization, with Five Year Plans, brutal centralization of agriculture, and Stalin’s efforts to ensure people’s loyalty by purging—or eliminating—anyone he suspected of not being loyal to the party or himself. The party elite had a lot of paranoia about “class enemies”, and Stalin knew just how to use it. He played into their fears to gain support for his state machinery of terror and suppression during the purges.
This system didn’t entirely work as planned. Outwardly, it consolidated and exercised power in an authoritarian and totalitarian way. But historian Ronald Grigor Suny has argued that the reality was not so straightforward. In this period, he writes, the state “was in actuality a disorganized, inefficient, and unresponsive leviathan.” With this in mind, we can think of Stalin’s USSR in the 1930s as a regime striving to become totalitarian, but not “totally” getting there.
Social history affects how we understand the nature of power under Stalin’s state. Even if this state was as dysfunctional as Suny claims, it still had a profound impact on how people actually lived. State intervention at so many levels of everyday life did link people’s destinies to regime politics. To get food and a livelihood, folks had to learn how to deal with the state bureaucracy, however incompetent it may have seemed. To do this, they acquired or invented a range of skills. Sheila Fitzpatrick calls these skills “strategies of survival and advancement.” Similarly, Stephen Kotkin calls them “little tactics of the habitat.” After Stalin’s death in 1953 and up to the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, relationships between individuals and the state grew even more complex.
For our purposes, the main point here is that the state and the people had to evolve a system through negotiation with each other. If the state forced people to adopt certain behaviors to survive, people might respond with innovations that the state did not anticipate, but could work with. To the degree we want to think of the USSR in the 1930s as totalitarian, then, we must still consider the role of regular citizens in the shaping of the Soviet system during this period. Their ability to cope, adapt, and innovate does not diminish the brutality or destructiveness of Stalinist politics. But it does make us reflect on the limits of totalitarianism.
One way we can see that is through the particular forms of everyday humor that emerged in the Soviet Union. Telling jokes reflected, challenged, and potentially threatened one’s safety within a political system that aimed for total obedience.
What do these jokes reflect about the extents — and limits — of totalitarian control in the USSR?
A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. "I just heard the funniest joke in the world!" "Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge. "I can't – I just gave someone ten years for it!"
So long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.
"Lenin has died, but his cause lives on!" (This was an actual slogan.)
I would prefer it the other way round.
Q: Will there be a Cheka [state police, later replaced by the KGB] in the final stage of communism?
A: As you know, under communism, the state will be abolished, together with its means of suppression. People will know how to self-arrest.
Q: How do you deal with mice in the Kremlin?
A: Put up a sign saying "Collective Farm". Then half the mice will starve, and the rest will run away.
"Three gulag inmates are telling each other what they’re in for. The first one says: 'I was five minutes late for work, and they charged me with sabotage.' The second says: 'For me it was just the opposite: I was five minutes early for work, and they charged me with espionage.' The third one says: 'I got to work right on time, and they charged me with harming the Soviet economy by acquiring a watch in a capitalist country.'"
Many jokes were structured as call-in questions to radio programs (Armenian Radio or Radio Yerevan.)
Armenian Radio was asked: "Is it true that conditions in our labor camps are excellent?"
Armenian Radio answers: "It is true. Five years ago a listener of ours raised the same question and was sent to one, reportedly to investigate the issue. He hasn't returned yet; we are told that he liked it there."
A new arrival to gulag is asked: "What were you given ten years for?" – "For nothing!" – "Don't lie to us here, now! Everybody knows 'for nothing' is three years.
Q: What's the difference between a capitalist fairy tale and a Marxist fairy tale?
A: A capitalist fairy tale begins, "Once upon a time, there was..." A Marxist fairy tale begins, "Some day, there will be..."
Q: Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR, just like in the USA?
A: Yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan", and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan", and you will not be punished. [Joke from the 1980s.]
From the 1960s until the early 1980s, the Soviet Union had only three newspapers, all state-run: Pravda ("Truth"), Izvestia ("News"), and Krasnaya Zvezda ("Red Star").
"In the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth.”
A man walks into a shop and asks, "You wouldn't happen to have any fish, would you?" The shop assistant replies, "You've got it wrong – ours is a butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. You're looking for the fishmonger across the road. They wouldn't happen to have any fish!"
A Russian and an American are seated next to each other on a plane. The American says, I have to hand it to you, your propaganda is very impressive. The Russian smiles and thanks him but replies that it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Confused, the American tells him, “but we don’t have propaganda.”
The Russian responds: “That’s how you know it’s working.”